When Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year, energy markets twitched and global headlines lit up. A narrow stretch of water, a handful of tankers, and suddenly the world economy was holding its breath. Now imagine the same chokepoint dynamic playing out a quarter of a million miles away.

That comparison is no longer fringe. A growing chorus of defense analysts, former NASA leadership, and Space Force planners is making a serious case that cislunar space, the vast region between Earth and the moon, could become the site of the next great geographic chokepoint. And as Space.com reported, the Pentagon has already started building the institutions to deal with that future.

A maritime chokepoint, but in orbit

Marc Feldman, executive director of the Center for the Study of Space Crime, Piracy & Governance, argues that the Hormuz crisis should be reframing how we think about the moon. His logic is straightforward. Cislunar space looks enormous on paper, but in practice spacecraft can only travel efficiently through a handful of pathways. Lose those, and you lose practical access to the moon itself.

That is not just rhetoric. It is geometry. There are five gravitational sweet spots in the Earth-Moon system known as Lagrange points, where the gravitational pull of the two bodies and the centrifugal pseudo-force cancel out. A spacecraft parked in a halo orbit around one of these points can sit there with minimal fuel for years. Anyone wanting to monitor lunar traffic, host long-endurance sensors, or stage equipment for resupply will gravitate to these locations.

Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has made the comparison explicit, telling a 2020 panel that the Lagrange points “are going to be very valuable choke points” in the same way the Strait of Hormuz, Gibraltar, and Malacca shape naval strategy today. The implication is uncomfortable. Whoever controls these points effectively writes the rules of access for everyone else.

Why the future economy makes this real

Peter Garretson, a senior fellow in defense studies at the American Foreign Policy Council and co-author of Scramble for the Skies, told Space.com that the answer to whether cislunar space could ever be interdicted depends entirely on how valuable the moon becomes. The current commercial value of lunar territory is small. The expected future value, in his framing, is enormous.

Garretson points out that not all cislunar real estate is created equal. “There is strategic ‘terrain’ in lunar orbits and Lagrange points,” he said, alongside concentrated mineral deposits, the lunar poles, and the equator.

Elon Musk has floated a future where electromagnetic catapults on the lunar surface launch hundreds of terawatts of orbital AI data centers per year. The economic logic is that the structural mass of a data center, the photovoltaics and thermal control hardware, can be sourced from the moon far more cheaply than from Earth. If even a fraction of that vision lands, any disruption to the lunar supply chain, whether at a mass driver, a refining station, or a key transit orbit, starts to look uncomfortably similar to closing a major strait.

The Pentagon is already moving

This is where it stops being purely theoretical. On April 16, the Space Force announced the establishment of a Cislunar Coordination Office to manage the service’s deep-space programs, according to SpaceNews. The office sits on the acquisition side and is tasked with building roadmaps for cislunar capabilities, coordinating efforts across DARPA, AFRL, and the intelligence community.

The new office is an outgrowth of the Trump administration’s December 2025 executive order on space superiority, which describes U.S. military responsibilities as extending from very low Earth orbit all the way through cislunar space. Breaking Defense reported that the order also mandates initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030, work that will require the kind of deep-space transportation, navigation, and communications architecture defense planners say will need protection.

Meanwhile, the Air Force Research Laboratory is preparing to launch Oracle Prime, an experimental surveillance satellite that will operate in a halo orbit around the L1 Lagrange point. As Air & Space Forces Magazine noted, Oracle is the first satellite designed for sustained operations at L1, and the program is expected to inform broader space domain awareness work in the region.

The U.S. military’s existing tracking network is concentrated in low Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit, leaving large blind spots farther out. Objects approaching from cislunar space could arrive on trajectories that current sensors struggle to detect, a gap that has been flagged repeatedly in recent Pentagon discussions.

Not everyone is buying the hype

Worth noting that not every analyst thinks the Strait of Hormuz comparison holds up, at least not yet. A 2024 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled Salmon Swimming Upstream found, according to Breaking Defense, no compelling near-term strategic military value to cislunar operations and warned about hype around both technological readiness and commercial demand. The CSIS authors did concede that space situational awareness for surveillance purposes was the one area where investment made sense.

That mixed signal, future-focused on one hand, sceptical on the other, is essentially the whole debate in miniature. The question is not whether cislunar space currently matters militarily. It is whether it will, and on what timeline.

What it would actually mean

If Garretson’s projection is right, and the moon ends up playing a role in the global economy comparable to the Persian Gulf today, the implications are uncomfortable. Analysts of China’s space ambitions have warned that Beijing views Lagrange points and lunar orbits as strategic key points and could eventually declare exclusive economic zones or keep-out areas in cislunar space. Whether or not that scenario plays out, the fact that serious people are wargaming it tells you where the conversation is heading.

The Strait of Hormuz works as a chokepoint because closing it is cheap, fast, and disproportionately consequential. Cislunar space is not yet at that level. But the Pentagon is no longer treating that as a far-future problem. It is treating it as a planning assumption, and the institutions being stood up right now are designed to make sure the U.S. is not on the wrong side of the next chokepoint.